Much trauma is caused by unfair uses of power in groups, particularly by moderators of online communities, who often act with unfair bias. This is a place to make such cases known to try to deter them from happening.

Monthly Archives: June 2006

The email list Wiki-en-l, for discussing Wikipedia, has a separate membership mechanism from Wkipedia. So it has been the only place for many of Wikipedia’s victims to raise objections to bullying by the admins there and blatantly biased blocks and purges. Throughout the rest of Wikipedia, the openly corrupt trick has always been – that there are pages within Wikipedia where you are supposed to raise appeals against what an admin has done, but if you are blocked the block itself prevents you from writing anything on those pages!! And if you create a second log-in identity just so you can do this, this gets counted as the offence of creating a second identity to evade a block!!

So now, of course, as Wikipedia turns in on itself as all purge-ridden tyrannies end up doing, it is being proposed on Wiki-en-l that objections to blocks should be excluded from being made on Wiki-en-l.

A then-recent victim of Wikipedia’s ruthlessness pointed out some good sense, here :

> Is this official? Should I update the wikien-l page to tell people
> *not* to email for unblock requests?Why not go ahead and do the next logical step: Tell people to post
their unblock requests to [[WP:ANI]], where they will be subsequently
permbanned for “evading” their block and “disruption”, and get their user page vandalized by an admin as a follow-up. Am I trolling? No. This is what actually happened.

The answer, as you see here, was “Piss off.” !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oct 6 : a recent admin’s quitting notice against the system there was damning.

[All the links above here are old links from 2006 to mail.wikimedia.org, they will now bounce unless you have access to that list: for these links, converting “mail” to “list” does not lead to the same pages.]

Feb 23 : Check out Parker Peters’s entry here for Feb 23 on how he had “exposed step by step” the behaviour of administrator cabals, in the Wiki-en-l forum before getting banned from it for it.

It’s been a busy week for the pipeline that connects the consensus-reality wonderland of Wikipedia with Planet Earth. You won’t believe what’s just tumbled out at this end. Wikipedia’s Maximum Leader Jimmy Wales, it transpires, has blessed an identity fraudster who bamboozled journalists last year, by rewarding him with a full-time job and promotion to Wikipedia’s politburo. …

Wales’ insouciance left onlookers amazed. “It does make you wonder about what else happens at Wikipedia that Jimmy Wales doesn’t have a problem with,” wrote author Stephen Dubner.

Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger correctly describes it as an ‘identity fraud’. And quite brilliantly, Sanger also gets to the core of the problem – the alternative reality, created by the Wikipedians cult-like devotion to the cause. (As with many cults, failings are attributed to outsiders).

“Wikipedians have plainly become a very insular group: they have their own mores and requirements, which are completely independent of the real world,” writes Sanger. “Indeed, that’s what this story is about, after all: real-world identities and credentials are rejected as unnecessary by Wikipedia. How could Wikipedia fail to become insular with that attitude? ”

25 May 2006,

on Wiki-en-l the publicly accessible mailing list of Wikipedians discussing the workings of Wikipedia and cases of blocking/banning, this appeared, by member Molu:

Protection of a Wikipedia page means a programmed block against the normal position that all-comers can edit and add to it. These protections are already applied as emergency temporary measures, to Wikipedia articles that become objects of heated argument. That is inevitable. But now, they are moving to secret, unannounced, protection controls programmed into many of their article pages on a permanent basis. On these “semi-protected” pages it will be like a moderated forum – any contribution won’t get through or seen, in the first place, unless the Wikipedia admin who has been assigned to do the protecting chooses to let it.

Not the orignal Wikipedia idea at all. Yes, give them the bad publicity. All Wikipedia’s purge victims are vindicated.